13 Jul, 2025 Programming Language Theory (PLT) is one of my favourite areas of computer science yet I feel it's one of the most misunderstood by outsiders. It's full of beautiful constructions and great ideas at the intersection of pure theory and practical applications. And yet outside of the PLT community, it's considered cryptic, hard, useless, not practical. The problems are similar to the public perception of pure maths ("why would I learn it?", "does it have any practical applications?") b...